First impressions, backup plans and video

Paul Dewar running for the leadership of the Federal NDP made a town hall campaign stop in Winnipeg’s Point Douglas area.
Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press

I found it highly amusing that yesterday, on a day off from work, I was tapping away on my bb pearl’s half keyboard (I hate it so much!) while standing in line at the Apple Store to make an appointment for my bricked iPhone. I made the classic mistake of not listening to my own advice to wait a few days before updating to iOS5. At some point in the update after the phone had been wiped of iOS4.3.5 but before the new iOS could be installed the Apple server feeding the authorization crashed. Nothing I tried worked, so I was standing in line at the Apple Store tweeting the travesty of it all. Meanwhile most other bb users were crying about lost service…

Finally after about eight hours of agony my phone was back working with the new iOS. Naturally the first thing I did was use the volume snap feature that most people who use the iPhone to take photos have wanted since the camera was first included in the iPhone. It works great. It’s simple and very useful.

My first impressions with regard to the new iOS5 are great… besides the disaster of it’s install, I am looking forward to seeing the volume snap feature in updates to my favorite camera apps. I have yet to see any broken apps after the update. The new “newsstand” app is interesting, I may have to spend some $$$ to see what the hubbub is all about. Overall it’s great.

The whole ordeal of updating made me think of how hard photographers try to anticipate all possible scenarios and to have backup plans in place incase things go wrong.

For instance I’ve mentioned my Eye-Fi card setup, but I have a back up to that system as well. It involves the iPhone and an sd card reader. It’s called ZoomIt and requires an app of the same name to interact with it. Using this you can copy over to your iPhone photo album individual images. Then all you have to do is process the image and add the caption in your favorite apps.

It is a brilliant little gadget, but not as fast as the Eye-Fi card.

All this gadgetry is interesting, but the important thing to remember is that speed is only one component and not really the most important one at that. Taking good strong images trumps everything and if you find yourself fiddling with your phone missing potential photos you may need to rethink things. I’m finding that these gadgets have their moments of best use and identifying those moments, learning when to grab the iPhone and send it a photo via Eye-Fi or ZoomIt is a fun challenge.

Each assignment is a new opportunity to teach myself how to integrate alternate technology.

Today for instance I discovered that my Eye-Fi card needed to be re-set on my laptop, so, I thought it would be fun to work with my “plan B” system.

At another assignment today I realized that the broadcast media was out in full force, but no one had mentioned to me about shooting video. I didn’t have time to set up for a full video shoot with my DSLR, so decided to shoot the main assignment for stills and use my iPhone during a media scrum that was to take place afterwards. It worked out OK, even though I didn’t have a proper mic with me (Gotta remind myself to carry one with me to everything now).

One of the things we are trying to figure out at the Freep is how to better handle video. Tyler Walsh our multimedia editor just wrote a piece on our website today about that subject too. You should check it out and let him know what you think.